On the set for the PEOPLE cover shoot for Freakier Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are having a little bit of a flashback. It’s an apt moment for the sequel to the hit 2003 film, this time with Lohan’s character Anna as a mother to her own teen daughter (played by Julia Butters) and Curtis returning as Anna’s mom Tess, who is now a grandmother. They are thinking of their own moms.
Of course, Lohan, 39, and Curtis, 66, were both raised in Hollywood, and on sound stages such as this one. The former, a child of screen idols Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh who found early fame in the Halloween franchise, is enjoying a recent Oscar-and-Emmy-winning renaissance in films and television. The latter grew up right here at Disney, with Lohan’s first film being a different remake, The Parent Trap. Lohan’s first words to Curtis when they met to shoot Freaky Friday in the early 2000s: “Hi Mom.”
Asked when they first began seeing glimpses of their own mothers in themselves, Lohan is quick to answer about her mother, Dina. “I always ask my husband, ‘Am I like my mom?’ And he says, ‘Yes, your, your mannerisms are a lot like your mom.’ And I think it’s a very New York thing. I was raised very New York, and my mom is very New York. But also her maternal sense. She’s very close with all of her kids. I think I’m more protective than she is.”
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Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis in 1979
Curtis says, “I tried to do everything not to be my mother. And, of course, I’m very much like my mother in many, many, ways. My admiration for her has swelled as my disappointments have lessened. I know that my mother was so proud of me and and what I’ve achieved, that she respected my husband’s work and was thrilled to be a grandma.”
Leigh died in 2004 at 77.
“My mother’s been gone a long time. And today I have a freedom to be myself that my mother’s generation would never have allowed. My mother would’ve been incredibly upset at [the Oscar-winning film] Everything Everywhere All at Once and how I looked. My mother would have loathed—”
Lohan interjects. “Don’t say that though. Because you never know —”
“I do know,” replies Curtis. I do know because her generation was so much about your body and what you look like. And the beauty. The beauty is just who she was. That’s what her life was. My mother was literally jaw dropping. But I think that would’ve been very hard for her to see me with my tummy sticking out. Or in [the film] Last Showgirl, for her to see me in that dressing room at 66 years old. That really would’ve upset her. I know her very well. I have accepted myself in a much bigger way than I think she felt she was allowed to, through her generation.”
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Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All At Once
Curtis says that “the whole kit and caboodle” of the Freaky Friday films is “take a walk in my shoes.” Lohan adds, “don’t judge a book by its cover. Because we tend to do that in this world so quickly. And it’s important to take the time to actually get to understand someone before you put labels on them.”
“The whole construct of a Freaky Friday movie,” Curtis says, “is ‘you don’t understand me, I don’t understand you, body swap and it allows you to walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes.’ And in the world today where labels get placed and they are limited and boxed, and there’s no chance for listening. It’s assumptions and ideas that we’ve placed on other people. And to me, the beauty of these movies is we blow it all up and we expose what we are, which is human. And flawed and fragile. And funny.”
Freakier Friday is in theaters Aug. 8.
For more from Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
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